Comments for Neil Grahnhttp://neilgrahn.com
A seriously funny guyThu, 20 Aug 2015 03:06:23 +0000hourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.2.10Comment on The Irrelevant Show by Marion Toffanhttp://neilgrahn.com/the-irrelevant-show/comment-page-1/#comment-298
Thu, 20 Aug 2015 03:06:23 +0000http://neilgrahn.com/sandbox/?p=105#comment-298Hello Neil – yes Marion with those grease pencils sitting at the rafters for years doodling away at Loose Moose. Tonight for some reason I thought it might be fun to find Ingrid von Darl – I produced a giant portrait of the Danish mask specialist …thought it would be fun to send her a thumbnail.

Couldn’t find her. Surfing around on Wikipedia there was a very long list of actors who participated in Loose Moose. And your name was missing. Jeez Neil – put it in would you?

And if you write me back I will attempt to send you a shot of the unfinished canvas that I began years ago but succumbed to water on the lung and never completed. I was trying out that dreadful paint from Windsor and Newton – alkyd. Boy – nothing to use for a large painting project. The medium was impossibly sticky.

Your Improv scene was bathed in nightlight … there were only two actors moving around the carpet – you and Frank Totino competing with each other in what I called a detective scene.

My little work from that Sunday evening inspired the bigger painting – which now scares my few visitors. I live on the Sunshine Coast in Gibsons – where weather is mild.
M.

As someone with only two (minor) references in Wikipedia compared to your four I hesitate to challenge your assertion that the rules of balloon volleyball are simple. However like many informal games lacking a professional league or Olympic status, balloon volleyball suffers from a complex and confusing web of competing regulations.

While indeed SOME sets of rules are simple (for example those listed at http://fusenvolleyball.blogspot.com/ ) other set of rules are much more complex, like the Japanese handi-able version described at http://www.ehow.com/list_7172035_balloon-volleyball-rules.html Back in my Cambridge days the rules differed from the Oxford version (sofas and armchairs versus books cases and wine racks as net and modern balloon versus inflated sheep’s bladder as ball among other key differences) and no compromise has every been negotiated to allow it to join the list of sports (from Tiddleywinks to Real Tennis) in which these and indeed other ancient rivalries are fought.

Some feel that the diversity of rules is part of the charm of this ancient sport – whose rules appear never to have been formally unified since the first unambiguous description as “Aerokysti Kotsia” (air-bladder ball) in the third tractate of St Agios the decrepit. Indeed this disunity may by preventing the development of competitive leagues have saved us from the uglier aspects of modern sports – balloon volleyball being for example one of the few ball sports with no recorded cases of steroid or other drug abuse.